Hubert Küenster immigrated from Germany to America in May 1852, worked for a year as a clerk in Dr. Berghoff’s drug store in St. Louis, then moved to Waterloo in 1853 at the request of countrymen living nearby and opened the first drug store in Monroe County out of his residence, marrying Bertha Berghoff the same day. After continuing in business until 1855, he returned for a visit to Germany, came back to America in 1856, operated a drug store from his residence from 1857 to 1865, and then moved the business to the old Borchert property he bought in 1865. That earlier building was demolished in 1871, and a new Hubert Küenster Drug Store building was completed in 1872, regarded as perhaps the largest and finest business building in Waterloo and Monroe County, and it is the building that still stands. P.A. Hamacher, a graduate of the St. Louis College of Pharmacy in 1895, opened his own pharmacy there at 127 South Main in 1896. During Prohibition, bottled in bond 100 proof whiskey from a government distillery in Kentucky was available only by a doctor’s prescription and was sold there. Hamacher’s daughter Adele married Joseph Sidney, or Sid, Wightman, who had an accounting degree from the University of Illinois, later graduated from his father-in-law’s alma mater, and took over the pharmacy in 1955, the same year P.A. Hamacher bought the Küenster building. P.A. Hamacher and Sid mixed their own chemical compounds with mortar and pestle, and Sid also made “poison wheat” for farmers to kill field mice, a product no longer allowed because of its high toxicity. From its earliest years, the pharmacy sold home goods including paint, varnish, school textbooks, and fireworks, while doctors often dispensed medicines directly from their offices or on house calls, reducing how often people needed a pharmacy for medicine. Its soda fountain, open year-round until it closed in 1948, made the store a popular local gathering place. Sid and Adele’s son Tom Wightman, a 1959 graduate of St. Louis College of Pharmacy, took over the pharmacy in 1963 with help from his wife Bernice and his sister Betty, who inherited the building from Adele in 1968. Hamacher’s and then Wightman’s remained Waterloo’s only pharmacy until another pharmacy opened in the 1970s, and the family tradition continued when Tom and Bernice’s son Steve, a 1994 graduate of the St. Louis School of Pharmacy, began running Wightman’s Pharmacy in 1999.